Staff performance appraisal using fuzzy evaluation

Abstract

Most organizations use performance appraisal system to evaluate the effectiveness and efficiency of their employees. In evaluating staff performance, it usually involves awarding numerical values or linguistic labels to their performance. These values and labels are used to represent each staff's achievement by reasoning incorporated in the arithmetical or statistical methods. However, the staff performance appraisal may involve judgments which are based on imprecise data especially when human (the superior) tries to interpret another human (his/her subordinate) performance. Thus, the scores awarded by the appraiser are only approximations. From fuzzy logic perspective, the performance of the appraisee involves the measurement of his/her ability, competence and skills, which are actually fuzzy concepts that can be captured in fuzzy terms. Accordingly, fuzzy approach can be used to handle these imprecision and uncertainty information. Therefore, the performance appraisal system can be examined using Fuzzy Logic Approach and this was carried out in the study. The study utilized hierarchical fuzzy inference approach since performance evaluation comprises of four criteria; namely work achievement, skill knowledge, personal quality, and community services. The output of the study provides the ranking for staff performance. From this study, it is expected that reasoning based on fuzzy models will provide an alternative way in handling various kinds of imprecise data, which often reflected in the way people think and make judgments. © 2007 International Federation for Information Processing.